Refraction
refers to the bending of light as it passes through a tranparent surface in a Ray Trace renderer.

Translucency

Translucency is a form of
Transparency
where the light passes through a material, but you cannot see through the material. Note in the image that light from the lamp inside the translucent shade illuminates the wall. But the shade itself is not transparent.

Textures

Images

Image maps, or bitmaps, are two-dimensional patterns created using raster-based paint programs or by scanning photographs or other materials.

Procedural Bumps

Procedural Bumps use mathematical rules to provide the illusion of surface bumpiness in your material. You can add one or more procedural bumpmaps to a base material.

Types of procedural bumps are available:

Sandpaper

Rubble

Pyramid

Wrinkled

Marbled

Scale, Strength, and Rotation can be applied to some procedural bumps.

Image Properties

Tile Size

Controls the size of the image map. Image maps used in material definitions are always tiled. Tile size is displayed in current drawing units.

You can either maintain the aspect ratio or unlock the relationship and scale the x- and y-directions of the tile size independently.

Mirror Tiles

Causes your bump map to be mirrored both in the x and y directions as it is tiled. This can sometimes produce adequate results using bitmaps that do not tile correctly by guaranteeing that the tile edges are continuous. Mirroring the tiles is sometimes useful as it guarantees continuity at the tile edges if your images do not tile correctly.

Masking

Masking lets you restrict the use of your image map to a portion of the image only. The masked portions either have no affect on the underlying material, or you can make the underlying material completely transparent. Two types of masking are provided: color and alpha channel.

Strength

Strength of 1.00 means all of the object's color will be derived from the colors of your bitmap. If this setting is less than 1.00, color attributes of the underlying material show through.